Australia Rental Tax Statistics 2022-23

Methodology

This report analyses the Australian Taxation Office’s published Taxation statistics 2022-23 individuals rental-property tables. We downloaded the public XLSX workbooks for Individuals Table 26 and Individuals Table 27 from the data.gov.au mirror linked from the ATO statistics page, then parsed the 2022-23 rows into a deterministic JSON and CSV output.

The article figures are derived from analysis-output.json, generated from the staged source workbooks and provenance.json. The ATO source page is Taxation statistics 2022-23: individuals statistics, retrieved 30 April 2026.

Verbatim source attributions from the generated provenance file:

Australian Taxation Office, Taxation statistics 2022-23, Individuals Table 26: rental property schedule items.

Australian Taxation Office, Taxation statistics 2022-23, Individuals Table 27A: rental property interests by net rent position.

Australian Taxation Office, Taxation statistics 2022-23, Individuals Table 27B: rental property interests by taxable income range.

Australian Taxation Office, Taxation statistics 2022-23, Individuals Table 27C: rental property interests by state or territory.

The source data is licensed as CC BY 4.0. The analysis normalises the ATO tables into headline metrics only; it does not estimate unreported informal rental arrangements or infer investor wealth beyond the published taxable-income bands.

What the ATO data shows

Almost half of rental investors were negatively geared

In 2022-23, 2,261,080 individuals had an interest in at least one rental property. Of those, 49.41% reported an overall net rent loss, meaning their deductible rental expenses exceeded rental income at the individual level. This figure is computed from ATO Individuals Table 27A, which separates investors by property-interest count and overall net rent outcome (ATO Individuals Table 27A, retrieved 30 April 2026).

The negative-gearing share is not evenly distributed across the property-count ladder. Investors with one property interest dominate the count, but the analysis also found that 9.49% of rental investors held three or more property interests. That tail matters because multi-property investors are a small share of people but a larger share of property interests (ATO Individuals Table 27A, retrieved 30 April 2026).

Interest costs dominated rental deductions

ATO Table 26 records rental-property schedule income and expense categories. In 2022-23, interest on loans accounted for 44.26% of total rental expenses in the parsed rental schedule rows. This makes borrowing costs the largest single pressure point in the rental tax data and helps explain why net rent losses remained common during the 2022-23 income year (ATO Individuals Table 26, retrieved 30 April 2026).

Across all parsed rental property schedules, net rental income after expenses was $1.59 billion. That aggregate profit can coexist with a 49.41% negative-gearing share because the two measures answer different questions: Table 26 totals schedule-level dollars, while Table 27A counts individuals by their overall net rent outcome (ATO Individuals Tables 26 and 27A, retrieved 30 April 2026).

Investor concentration by state

New South Wales had the largest rental-investor count in 2022-23, with 789,131 individuals, or 34.9% of the national Table 27C investor count. Victoria followed with 573,988 individuals, then Queensland with 376,211. The distribution broadly follows population and property-market scale, but the New South Wales concentration is still notable: roughly one in three rental investors in the ATO table is attached to New South Wales (ATO Individuals Table 27C, retrieved 30 April 2026).

Taxable-income distribution

Rental investors were concentrated in middle and higher taxable-income bands. The analysis found that 38.94% of investors with rental property interests had taxable income above $100,000, using the two upper Table 27B bands: $100,001 - $500,000 and More than $500,000 (ATO Individuals Table 27B, retrieved 30 April 2026).

This does not mean every high-income taxpayer owns rental property, and it does not measure wealth. It does show that the rental-investor population in the ATO table is weighted toward taxable-income bands above $100,000 compared with the lower bands.

What this means for landlords

The 2022-23 ATO rental tables show a market where debt costs are central. Interest on loans was the largest expense component in the parsed Table 26 data, and almost half of rental investors reported an overall net rent loss. For landlords, this makes record quality and expense categorisation unusually important: small errors in interest, repairs, agent fees, or other schedule items can materially change the tax position that appears in the annual return.

For a broader view of how tax paperwork fits with refinancing, tenancy deadlines, compliance documents, and portfolio decisions, see our Australian pillar guide: What Amateur Property Investors Actually Need in Australia.

The data also shows that rental ownership is usually not a large-portfolio activity. Most individuals in Table 27A held one or two property interests, while 9.49% held three or more. That matters for software and advisory workflows: the typical landlord needs simple, high-confidence document capture for one or two properties, while the portfolio tail needs cross-property controls, attribution, and audit trails.

For policy readers, the key caution is that no single metric tells the whole rental-tax story. Negative gearing is a people-count measure in Table 27A; interest dominance is an expense-share measure in Table 26; state concentration comes from Table 27C; and taxable-income concentration comes from Table 27B. The combined picture is stronger than any single headline.